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Can There Be a Catholic Moment?

February 19, 2013 12:30 pmFebruary 19, 2013 12:30 pm

My weekend column made the case that Catholicism’s influence on American political culture went into steep decline across the eight years of Benedict XVI’s pontificate, as the Republicans turned from the solidarity-inflected language of compassionate conservatism to the rhetoric of “makers versus takers” and the Democrats swung leftward on abortion and picked religious-liberty fights with Catholic institutions. The American Conservative’s Rod Dreher agrees with me, but basically argues that it was inevitably going to be thus, because the patterns of American modernity make any hope a “Catholic moment” in our politics or culture essentially chimerical:

It is too convenient to blame the execrable behavior of the bishops in the abuse scandal for the end of the Catholic moment … The rotten behavior of the bishops, among others, hastened the decline of Catholic authority in American life, but if we’re honest, we will have to admit that even if the bishops had been luminous saints to the man, the second coming of the Apostles, things wouldn’t be all that different from where they stand today.

The fact of the matter is that Roman Catholic Christianity (also Orthodox Christianity, and some forms of Protestantism) cannot be reconciled with the expressive individualism that is the hallmark of late modern civilization … there never was a possibility for a Catholic moment in America. Not even American Catholics agree on what it means to be Catholic, and what is required of them as Catholics … Catholicism in this country has lost its distinctives, because many, probably most, actual Catholics have no sense that the faith they profess calls them to accept and to live by a set of theological and moral precepts that they may struggle to accept, but must accept because God revealed them authoritatively through His church.

One may say this is a good thing, this Protestantization of Catholicism, or one may decry it as a bad thing. But I don’t see how one can credibly say that it doesn’t exist. Catholicism, understood on its own terms, is radically opposed to American culture, and to the essence of modernity. Catholicism, as understood by most American Catholics, is not. There’s the problem with the Catholic moment, and why it was never going to happen. Of course, the behavior of the bishops in the abuse crisis didn’t help, but ultimately it was beside the point.

I share Dreher’s doubts about the essential compatibility of Catholicism and liberal modernity, but I think this is much too absolute a line. A kind of “Catholic moment” in our politics and culture need not require perfect unity within the church, nor a sweeping renunciation of individualism on the part of those outside it. It only requires that distinctively Catholic ideas about the common good enjoy more influence and prestige than they do at present — and even in an age of institutional Christian weakness, this seems to me an attainable goal. America can remain a minority Catholic country, and orthodox believers can remain a minority within the larger group of self-identified Catholics, without Catholic influence on American society necessarily tracing an arc of permanent decline.

Certainly the experience of the last century suggests as much. To generalize a bit, Catholicism enjoyed more influence in the United States in the 1950s than in the 1920s, and more influence in the 1990s than in the 1970s. The Republican Party took more cues from Catholic social teaching in 2000 than in 1994, and the Democratic Party seemed friendlier to Catholic ideas in 2006 than in 1992. And while deep structural forces — mass immigration, the Cold War, the sexual revolution — mattered to the ebbs and flows of Catholic influence, individual personalities and thinkers mattered immensely as well. The Catholic liberals of the 1930s and the Catholic neoconservatives of the 1970s shaped law and public policy debates more decisively than either the Catholic left or right does today. John Paul II and Mother Teresa made Catholic ideas more attractive than Roger Mahony and Bernard Law. George W. Bush and Michael Gerson took Catholic social teaching more seriously than Jim DeMint and Glenn Beck. Mario Cuomo and Andrew Cuomo are both cafeteria Catholics, but the father was straining (however unpersuasively) to keep a certain kind of Catholic liberalism alive, whereas the son is a functionally post-Catholic creature of the Bloombergist center-left.

Acknowledging structural forces, in other words, doesn’t mean ignoring the way that individual choices shape how those forces make themselves felt. So yes, I do think that if the American bishops had been, not “luminous saints” regarding sex abuse, but just more competent and courageous and less self-protective and corrupt, the church they shepherd would enjoy (and deserve) significantly more influence today, both over its own flock and society as a whole. (One need not undersell the forces hostile to Catholicism in our culture to recognize the sex abuse scandals as a grim turning point in the American religious story.) I also think that Catholic social thought would enjoy more bipartisan appeal today if the Bush presidency had ended in something other than disaster, that Catholic ideas would find a wider audience if Catholic pundits and intellectuals were more critical of their respective “teams” of left and right, and that the church’s media image would be less tarnished if the Vatican bureaucracy could be dragged into the 20th century, let alone the 21st. I’m sure I could come up with many more such counterfactuals, given world and time enough — and I don’t think I’m pining for an impossible Arcadia by imagining that at least some of them were plausible.

Again, I’m not denying that the Catholic faith will always be rowing against the currents of a late-modern mass democracy like ours. But boats can beat successfully against a current (and make room for more passengers on board), or they can just be carried backward toward the sea. A “Catholic moment” exists, in this sense, when the barque of Peter seems to be making some headway — and to the extent that such a moment has vanished in our own era, as much blame has to belong to the rowers who ignored obvious rocks, smashed their oars or kicked holes in the bottom as to the river of modernity itself.

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Ross Douthat joined The New York Times as an Op-Ed columnist in April 2009. Previously, he was a senior editor at the Atlantic and a blogger for theatlantic.com. He is the author of "Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class" (Hyperion, 2005) and the co-author, with Reihan Salam, of "Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream" (Doubleday, 2008). He is the film critic for National Review.